


things not found

by sinkingsidewalks



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 7x01 Tag, Angst, Character Study, Does this make sense?, F/M, Gen, Season/Series 07, but mostly introspection, don't ask me, no real spoilers, or not anything very episode specific, vague timeline setting too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:21:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24766117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinkingsidewalks/pseuds/sinkingsidewalks
Summary: She misses Fitz's steadiness, even in the hands that would shake. He’s always been her touchstone, gravitating to his opinion when she was unsure of an idea, curling into his side when she forgot herself, fingers falling to his ring when she thought she’d lost him forever. She’s not sure who she would be without him and it’s not a hypothetical question; she’s not sure who she is.
Relationships: Jemma Simmons & Skye | Daisy Johnson, Leo Fitz & Jemma Simmons, Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons, Phil Coulson & Jemma Simmons
Comments: 9
Kudos: 34





	things not found

__

_On foot  
I had to cross the solar system  
before I found the first thread of my red dress.  
I sense myself already.  
Somewhere in space hangs my heart,  
shaking in the void, from it stream sparks  
into other intemperate hearts. _  
-Edith Sodergran 

I. Arrival of the Birds

When she thinks back to the girl who stepped off the plane in America, walked through the doors of the Academy, the image curls in the back of her throat. It’s the not quite nausea of gravity pulling when the Zephyr takes off. Milk curdling in a saucepan on the stovetop just a second before she can tend it. A two day old sunburn that still aches against sticky sheets when she lays on her back. 

She was so small – no shorter than she is now – and brittle and young. She remembers the suitcase – too large for her – and the handsome blond that hefted it up the dorm stairs when he saw her yanking it up, banging, step by step, by the handle. Her hands shook and her palms sweat and she shrunk even further when he smiled at her. It aches, like the first day of a cold, before you know you’re really sick, but she can’t shy away from it. 

She thinks of the dorm room that was so small it felt like it curled around her and the wide open lecture halls she gave presentations to without a hint of a tremble in her fingertips and talking so fast no one could understand her words but not being able to shape them properly around her ideas anyway. 

Now when she speaks it’s pitch perfect, like she’s running from a script, perfectly memorized, so vivid she can read it behind her eyes like her Chem textbook after three weeks of studying for her A levels. Every word structured in the paragraphs and sentences of a finished essay – fact, evidence; statement, correlation. Her voice doesn’t shiver, it’s too cold, or shake; her words don’t wander away from her, hardly even when she talks to Fitz. 

She hadn’t always been prim and proper, she was the kind of child who raced her bike through mud puddles and spent hours digging in the garden with her Gran, but the older everyone got around her, as she passed placement tests and evaluations and left her peer group behind, the more mature she had to be. By the time she reached America it was a well-worn habit, a cozy knit sweater that shielded her against the wind, and now it’s a mask that only slips in the stormiest of weather.

 _I like following the rules and doing what’s expected of me,_ she’d said once to Daisy, so long ago that the memory feels forged, before there was super heroes and time travel, back when she felt she had nothing but before she lost everything. At the time they were well rehearsed. Engrained so deep she couldn’t help but believe them. 

But now that she sits with them – is forced to sit with everything, the weight of her Grandmother’s hand in hers as she slipped away, watching Fitz through the thick glass of a decompression chamber, skin pale and sickly, dark shadows beneath his eyes, seeing Bakshi crumble to dust and Ward remain in place – she’s not sure if they’ve ever been true. She thinks of blowing things up at the Academy, of cutting open worms from her Gran’s garden to see if their tails would grow back, of the cold certainty of a weapon in her hand. Then she thinks about hours spent alone in her dorm room studying to prove herself the best, about girls in the school toilet who felt meters taller than her reapplying their lipstick before the bell summoned them to their lessons and Jemma skirting around their ankles, avoiding mixed glares and sly looks as she followed them back to the classroom. 

How many of her choices have been to avoid making waves? Not that that’s entirely right either, not like she didn’t choose SHIELD in America despite her father’s warnings and her mother’s worry. She made Fitz go into the field. She asked him to marry her too. 

So really, she’s thirty odd years old – with the time travel and the space travel her true age is impossible to calculate, during those months she spent laid up after her scoliosis surgery she watched the satellites as well as the stars, and she learned about relativity, about the speed of light, about perception; time dilation has gone with her farther than she ever imagined it would – and she’s lost to herself.

Fitz always made more sense. He fit his own skin. From the moment she met him he was shy to the point of awkward. Sightless in his pursuit of knowledge. Competitive but never brutal. There’s always been an ease in him, despite his gracelessness, despite his flaws, that she would sit back and marvel at. 

She misses his steadiness, even in the hands that would shake. He’s always been her touchstone, gravitating to his opinion when she was unsure of an idea, curling into his side when she forgot herself, fingers falling to his ring when she thought she’d lost him forever. She’s not sure who she would be without him and it’s not a hypothetical question; she’s not sure who she is. 

He would disagree. The man who is her husband would shake his head and tell her that she had it all wrong, that she was the presence of morality and ingenuity while he is the monster their children should be afraid of at night. But he was wrong, that wasn’t him, it’s always been that simple to her. 

They’ve always been able to see each other more clearly than they could see themselves, that she knows for certain. She also knows that she loves with her whole heart. That she’s always been more afraid of the past than the future. That she takes her tea with two sugars. 

She does whatever it takes. She traverses deep space and hangs an alien by his ankle. She gives a lecture to her Mum and Dad on why she should have a baby sister, then another on why her parents shouldn’t get divorced before she leaves for school. She drinks thirteen cups of coffee to stay up to finish her dissertation and by the end of it she can’t read, she looks at the page of words that must be English, but may as well be a language she’s never seen before, one that’s yet to be invented. She drives the spiked edge of the wire into the back of the Chronicom’s neck.

II. Fields in Bloom

“Aren’t you tired?” Daisy asks, her feet propped up on a console even though she can’t know what it does or what damage she could be causing, perfectly American in that way Jemma can never manage, despite the summer holidays she spent developing accents while her Mum spent her days sifting through American TV movies. 

Simmons looks up from her work screen, from the data that’s blurring before her eyes. Daisy’s head lolls off the back of her chair, her hair is back to a dark brunette and Jemma missed her. 

“What do you mean?” Her own accent sometimes feels like a caricature now, like something she puts on like she does up her hair; it’s been so long since she’s been to England she’s started to wonder if it’s any good. 

Daisy rolls her eyes. “When was the last time you got some rest?”

If she were fourteen, she would bite her lip and shrink her shoulders and if she were twenty three she would shrug them and brush it off as unimportant. Now she says, “I slept six hours last night.” It’s the most any of them can ask for. 

Not that they were consecutive. Not that she felt very rested when she ran a marathon in her dreams, and every hour she would wake clutching at the sheets for Fitz. She should be used to sleeping alone by now but she isn’t. 

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

She does. She can’t remember the last time she had a day off. The last time she had a lie in. The last time she went outside for the pleasure of it, for fresh air and a bit of sunshine. She’s become so used to the insolation the Zephyr affords her. She almost can’t remember what it’s like not to run off the dying fumes of adrenalin, to wake up in the morning and not have to shake off the exhaustion, the anxiety that weighs so heavy on her chest, and steel herself for all the things she must do, that she has no choice in. She won’t let good people die, and the price she pays for it is her life – her love of her husband, the dream she no longer allows herself to linger over of a little house and a little lab all to themselves, a home, a family. 

Fitz would squeeze her hand, would kiss her cheek and tell her someday, but Daisy reads the grief on her face and understands. She understands like May does, like Bobbi did – the impossibility of bringing a child into this world knowing what they know and dangers of what they do, and the impossibility of bringing a child into this world and not doing what they do – not fighting, not working to change the world for the better, for the sake of her child. 

It’s a catch-22. And the brutal truth that she doesn’t like to acknowledge is that she doesn’t trust Fitz with it. Doesn’t trust him not to lose himself for her, not to kill himself for the thing he loves the most. And she can’t do it alone. 

Daisy understands that too. Daisy has faced the storm of that loss, had it beat down on her, a gale force wind that tore her apart. She weathered that grief, then rebuilt despite the omnipresent clouds. Jemma’s not sure she could. She’s become too accustomed to her other half, her reflection distorted in a carnival mirror. Despite their separation the last few years, he’s still been there for her to return to, to come home to. Even when he was dead he wasn’t really dead. She thinks back to being a child, her time in school and Uni, and how her days were filled with charts and texts and the cold sterilized surfaces of the lab. She thinks of coming home to an empty house or a listless mother, of dishes piling up in the sink and frustrated ramblings in her own notes and how she’d forget for days on end to speak aloud, of trying to make the whole world out of only her own mind. 

It was so much easier to have someone to meet halfway, to have answers to her questions, and questions to her answers. To be without him is exhausting. Draining in a way that she can’t touch, else she’d collapse, lose the momentum that is the only thing keeping her from crumbling to dust. 

She looks at Daisy, at the dark circles beneath her eyes, the slump of her spine where she sags in the chair, and Jemma can only offer half a smile, one that says she understands what Daisy’s saying, that she knows and feels it, but doesn’t know how to rectify it. 

“Maybe one day,” she says, full of longing, a far off dream imagined, “maybe one day we’ll have the time.”

Daisy frowns, lines marring all the way through her face, and drops her feet to the floor. She makes to stand, but doesn’t. They’re all caught in this terrible middle road, lanes spread out around them but they’re stuck, traffic rushing on all sides. No one knows where the path will take them, just that they’re moving, and they don’t have a choice. Daisy comes to the realization, the fight slips out of her, and she sags back into her seat. 

Jemma misses the days when the biggest thing they had to worry about was Hydra. It seems so simple now, alliances and betrayals, putting her trust in only herself – that’s familiar to her. It’s always just been her, occasionally Fitz too, but she learned from an early age that if she needed anything she had to find a way to get it herself. 

Now she has a team, a family, like she never has before, but there’s a new pressure there. She always imagined that with enough people surrounding her, her worries would go away. Instead they magnify. It’s not just her anymore; these are all people she has to keep alive. 

So she builds the chamber to save May, opens the locked away LMD files to bring Coulson back, and designs new arms for Elena – or Fitz does, or they do together. She’s not sure where her idea starts and his ends most of the time, but she knows that nowadays if she said stop, he would. Unquestioningly, he would take her moral compass as his own, she told him enough of the past to ensure it. Part of her thinks that was wrong. To burden him with the things he did but didn’t do. 

She doesn’t blame this him for them, can’t, but she’s not entirely sure where she stands with that him. He died before she could figure it out. She knows psychology, understands mental health and illness, the limits of the mind and the things it’s liable to do when those limits are broken. She doesn’t count those actions as him because she knows they’re not. It’s everything else she can’t quite wrap her head around. The things he didn’t say to her, the secrets he kept, that she blames him for. 

“I don’t know where we go from here,” Daisy admits, voice under her breath with the same exhaustion she was just questioning of Jemma. Simmons isn’t sure if she was supposed to hear or not but she drags a chair over and collapses into it next to Daisy. Shoulder to shoulder they prop each other up, support beams set at fixed angles so together, neither could ever fall. The shape has held them strong through so much. She and Fitz catch each other, but with Daisy they never have to, they never sway or stumble.

Jemma sighs, the answer she doesn’t want sour beneath her tongue but still the only one she has to offer. “Forward.” They’ll keep bouncing through time, blindly, racing through the past for a solution she hadn’t found in the future. The only thing she knows is that they can’t go back. 

III. Deep Water

She has to run diagnostics on the Coulson LMD after they re-awaken it – him. She has to run diagnostics on Coulson. It’s a brave new world.

He’s awake as she does it, taking in the new lab as she works. Simmons compartmentalizes. She’s gotten good at it over the years. There’s the part of her that knows the science, knows the math and how the hardware fits together, same as biology, and there’s the part of her that feels. They hardly ever meet anymore. 

She checks that the code is still running seamlessly, that now that the mechanics are up and running there are no flaws, no misaligned joints in the titanium core or frayed wiring. She doesn’t check on what she thinks about it, how it feels to have this man stand before her, who for so long was more than a role model to her, who was more like a second father, who already came back once, but wasn’t himself, who now has all the memories and attitudes of the man she loved. 

Coulson didn’t get the memo. She can see it on his face while she runs the programming for a full twenty minutes that he wants to speak before he does. Part of her marvels at the technology, that it has his specific micro expressions and body ticks down perfectly. The other part dreads what he has to say, how she knows it’ll crack her open. 

“I’m sorry about Fitz,” he finally says, his voice soft, eyes subdued, and her heart aches. “I know I said it at the time, but, well, that wasn’t exactly me.”

She swallows the sudden lump in her throat. It feels so long ago now. Sitting in their room at the Lighthouse, cold all the way down to her bones, thinking she should be crying, but finding no tears in her eyes. The real Coulson sat with her for a long time, not saying anything, not giving her empty platitudes or false hope, just feeling the loss – the prior and the imminent. 

Their eyes meet and she has to look down at the monitor lest her emotions spill over. Fitz was gone, yes, but she got him back. He’s left again, but she got him back. That’s the important thing. She swallows the lump in her throat. 

“I’m sorry too.” She watches him out of the corner of her eye only.

An eyebrow raises, he turns his head. “For what?”

“Not being able to save you.”

He blinks, it would look odd on a robot but he’s not one so it’s perfect. Pride swells for Fitz’s work, then the ache of loss, the regret that tinges every time LMDs are brought up. The juxtaposition exhausts her so she shoves it aside. 

“It’s easy to forget that I died.”

“It can’t be an easy thing to process.”

“Even with my processing power.” He grins and it breaks her heart. “Sorry, Dad jokes. Guess you can’t remove those from the code?”

“Now that you’re awake I can’t exactly edit anything.” She doesn’t trust herself to, not when she’s already wondering how much of this is actually Coulson. She didn’t touch anything from the base personality, the scan of his brain saved from his time in the framework, tried only to add in information, but that information was coloured by her perspective, much as she tried to separate it, and this Coulson is different, simply by not having had to experience the last year of real Coulson’s life. She doesn’t know how small a difference it will make. She’s not sure how it could snowball into a drastic change. 

“So you’re stuck with it all I’m afraid.” Just like she’s stuck with her need to control everything and everyone around her, because that way they won’t leave her. Like Fitz is stuck with his demon. Like Daisy won’t ever truly be void of Lincoln’s ghost. 

“I guess I can only ask for so much.” He sighs and shifts his weight like he needs to. “How is everyone doing? Really? How are you, Jemma?”

“I’m fine.” She has to be.

**Author's Note:**

> You made it to the end! Congrats! Let me know if this worked at all because I really don't know. You can also find me on tumblr [sinkingsidewalks](https://sinkingsidewalks.tumblr.com)


End file.
